


marchbitten

by Summerlightning



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 04:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summerlightning/pseuds/Summerlightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People come from the village with long sticks.  Their noses are red and their eyes running, their voices hoarse and braying and choked.  They sink their sticks into the slush of the pond, scraping the bottom.  Jack is too curious not to watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	marchbitten

\---

Because the moon gives him no more than a name, Jack figures out little else his first winter beyond how to blister the world white as white will get. Snow -- summoning it, making it -- is his immediate specialty. Also ice, but that’s all. He learns to coax blizzards from the hook of his staff. He glazes the sugarpines soft beautiful silver in the mornings: he coats the hills with fresh powder ripe for the runners of sleds and paints pictures in the frost on windowpanes, and still nothing he does makes anyone in the village near his pond pay him any mind. The wind is more apt to turn their heads than his shouts, his strikes, his kisses.

(He tries everything.)

That wind: it nibbles at him sometimes. It urges him to _come with me far away from here high we’ll go high up up UP_ , but Jack only rides it a few leagues before returning to the pond. He doesn’t know what compels him to stay -- he doesn’t know much at all, really -- but stay he does, and by and by the days lengthen. The air thickens. Warms. Soon even his best efforts leave snow only in the deepest shadows, gone by midday. Limbs barren before put out tiny green buds, cone-shaped and conspicuous, and Jack murmurs to himself at last, “Spring’s here,” without knowing how he knows, just that it’s true.

The ice on his pond cracks. Small flaws to start: dimples, dents that deepen to dark blue faults sprawled across the slate surface. There are bubbles. Currents, lapping.

People come from the village with long sticks. Their noses are red and their eyes running, their voices hoarse and braying and choked. They sink their sticks into the slush of the pond, scraping the bottom. Jack is too curious not to watch.

The villagers dredge up branches. A mud-clotted wagon wheel. And then another thing, a long gray length of knotted frozen flesh, its face taut, its mouth open. In that rigid wet circle its teeth are little white pills, like mushroom caps in a fairy ring, and the villagers stare and Jack stares with them, his neck prickle-prickle crawling. But then, he’s always cold.

They wrap up the thing in a blanket. A quilt, pale with red star patches. Bloodblooms on snow.

They take it away.

Jack’s heels itch. His staff hums in his hands and his eyes are full. He blinks and there are tears, not too many -- they freeze halfway down his cheeks. He scratches them away with his fingernails, looks at them, wonders at them.

_Away now away come away come away_ , the wind whispers, rolling ’round his ears. It nips his lobes. _Away come away nothing here nothing left--_

Jack looks at the pond over his shoulder. Looks at the hole in the ice, gouged out gruesome, too warm now to refreeze.

He kicks off the shore: leaps up a lattice of budding branches and says, “Yeah, okay.” The wind catches him. “Let’s go.”


End file.
